Monday, March 5th, 2012 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade
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By Tony Attwood
On Saturday Liverpool outplayed us in the first half but we won. On Sunday Chelsea sacked another manager (I have lost count as to how many that makes), and Tottenham continued their current run of form. So quite a jolly weekend, except…
There is always something surrounding Liverpool that fills me with despair. To see a snarling fat steward raging at Van Persie as he wanted to give his shirt to a travelling fan is bad enough, but it followed a game where Suarez, after a match in which he used every dirty trick including a dive to get the penalty, and those irritating feet taps to trip up players, complained that it was an “unfair defeat” on Twitter.
Sky of course love Liverpool and treat Arsenal like something they have to deal with but wish they didn’t.
Le Tissier on the gantry said, and I quote it accurately, “I hope Diaby was injured”. Of course he will claim that this is taken out of context, and it is – the context was a debate over whether Diaby was being replaced for performance reasons or because he was injured, but even so… Given what the man’s last few years have been like it was a crass statement and an awful thing to say.
Then there was the even more disgraceful Redknapp the younger on Sky. He wondered what Liverpool would be like with Van Persie. But he said Liverpool couldn’t buy VP because (and again I quote exact words) “Those kind of players cost £40.”
Now I know it is difficult for Redknapp to keep up, but Liverpool spent £57.8m on two players who were supposed to be like Van Persie. Suárez and Carroll. Total goals in the league this season: nine. Racist outbursts: one. At least.
As for Robin, last time I checked he had scored over 30 this season, and had a racist outburst level of: zero.
But even with this outright nonsense and mindless gibberish Redknapp wasn’t done. He went on and on about how appallingly bad Arsenal were in terms of not tying down VP on a long term contract. “You just can’t do that with top players!” he complained over and over again. And then he told us that this was why we lost Cesc and Nasri.
The simple fact is that we have had players like Cesc on long contracts, and found as all other clubs have found, that if a player wants to go, you have to do a deal. That fact utterly escaped Redknapp. And the fact is that Liverpool do tie down players on long term contracts, and find themselves with… well Carroll who will earn £80k a week for another four years, and produce five goals a season.
It is a two way affair: get the wrong player on a long contract and you will never get rid of him, because he knows no one else will ever pay him such an insane salary. Get the right player on the standard four or five years, and the player looks at his options.
Go back to when VP signed his last contract and the AAA were making a big noise about getting rid of him because of his “glass ankles”. They didn’t even want the player sitting around – they wanted him out. Now these self-same people are complaining that we didn’t put him on a long enough contract.
The fact is, if you go back three years could you have predicted that Robin would have had a year like the one he has just had – injury free and scoring, scoring, scoring? If so you should be in management – and there is an endless merry-go-round to get yourself a job in. Chelsea are looking for a manager for example.
Redknapp actually said that the failure to get VP to re-sign a year ago shows the “arrogance of Arsenal”. And yes he really did use the word “arrogance”. He suggested that Arsenal had not re-signed VP because Arsenal expects every player to love the club so much that they will of course sign.
That is his vision, and Sky pay him to express it.
But Liverpool’s problems are far deeper than having a maniac like Redknapp spouting on their behalf on Sky. Like Tottenham they exist in a most awful run-down part of a city and have struggled for years to find a new home. Without a move Liverpool can’t generate the money they need – unless they plan on buying a Suárez and Carol every month and putting them on long term contracts.
But even then, they are a long way off. Dominating the game in terms of possession Liverpool had only four shots on targets to our seven, which doesn’t bode well when they have spent £57.8m on central attackers.
But they do things their own way in Liverpool. Remember the way they handled the racist row? Having seen their man accused they then gave out tee-shirts to say that he is was innocent – without waiting to see what the enquiry came up with. Innocence before being proven otherwise is of course right, but handing out all those shirts before any evidence is heard is a bit, well, childish. When he was indeed found guilty, they said they were not appealing “for the sake of football” when doing something for a non-racist society might be of greater value.
Such matters have never concerned Liverpool – whose effective long-term PR campaign has made us all remember Hillsborough (quite rightly) where Liverpool fans were not to blame, but forget Heysel where they most certainly were to blame for the deaths of many rival supporters. Quite what Standard Charter thinks it is getting out of sponsoring this club is quite beyond me.
The fact is that the club just doesn’t seem to care about how their players behave. At Arsenal we might remember the awful Carragher throwing a one pound coin into the crowd. Of course it was unacceptable that anyone should throw a coin at him in the first place, but the potential for damage to the mass of people in the crowd is far greater than that of one idiot throwing a pound at a moving player on the pitch. The coin from the crowd hit the grass. Unsurprisingly the coin into the crowd from Carragher hit a person. The player should have been banned from football for a year and the Arsenal ground for life. Instead he was sent off and got 3 games.
I expect Redknapp thought it just.
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